Question

Is it possible to execute a stored procedure in a view?

I.e.

CREATE VIEW [dbo].[v_ReportInvoiceClientsThisMonth]
AS
EXEC [dbo].[GetInvoiceClients] @startDate = ‘2009-03-01’, @endDate = ‘2009-04-01’

(doesn’t work)

The reason I need this is that I need a way to access the SP in Excel (in an idiot safe way, i.e. without VBA).

Answer 1

You can do this with a view over a table-valued function. This looks something like:

-- === Table-Valued function ====================================
--
create function fn_foo (
       @Date datetime

) returns @ResultSet table (
        DateKey           datetime
       ,DisplayDate       varchar (20)
) as
    insert @ResultSet (
           DateKey
          ,DisplayDate
    )
    select DateKey      -- Just pretend there's something to select
          ,DisplayDate  -- behind the scenes
      from ods.Dates
     where DateKey <= @Date
    return
go


-- === View ============================================
-- 
create view vw_foo (
       DateKey
      ,DisplayDate
) as
select DateKey
      ,DisplayDate
  from fn_foo ('2009-04-31')
go

There are a few caveats:

• There are some limits to what you can do with functions. In particular there is something of an impedance mismatch between stored procedure code and function code so you typically can’t use a function to wrap around a stored procedure for the purposes of doing this sort of thing.

• The first point means you will probably have to re-cast your stored procedure as a table-valued function.